Gawker Is A Blog. Just Like Twitter.

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker's blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some great responses, including two of my early favorites:

Joel Johnson, in 133 characters, offered up "Gawker Media is the size of a moderately successful local McDonalds franchise. So I guess it's a compliment that it's so interesting."

Felix Salmon, at 6000 words, covers Hungary and the Cayman Islands, Kinja and Blogwire, and probably other stuff that I missed.

Finally, Nick Bilton did a follow-up on the NY Times Bits blog today, which talks about this evolution of Gawker's design (which you can see for yourself at beta.gawker.com and then quotes me:

“I think Nick [Denton] is eager to declare this a post-blog design as a sop to advertisers,” he said. “It’s still a blog, it’s just the blog is in a narrower column.”

This is true! I do think this — Gawker is still, and always has been, just a nicely designed blog. Same goes for its sister sites. But what neither Nick mentioned is an idea that I've shared with them both, that Gawker's redesign to me shows an interesting convergence around a pattern that is best exemplified by, of all things, the new Twitter design.

River On One Side, Party On The Other

Let's consider the core elements of a reverse-chronological headline flow, accompanied by a sort of "content well" where rich media items sit. I mumbled about this a bit a few months ago in Twitter, Transclusion and Trust, but basically a half-decade after RSS readers failed to take over the world, major media sites are all converging on the idea of a two-paned reader, with a river of news of headlines that can be clicked to yield an embedded article reader that prominently features video, photos or other rich content. Here's a side-by-side comparison, with the bloggy parts highlighted:

Interestingly, this sort of seems like blogs have finally adopted elements of web applications as part of their fundamental design. Many have noted how the new Twitter on the web seems influenced by Twitter on the iPad (though the order of the two platforms' release may not have been the order of their creation), but in chatting today Nick Denton mentioned that there has seemed to be a sort of convergent evolution around these ideas between Twitter's work, Gawker's redesign, and other apps as well. Nick specifically mentioned the Mail app on the iPad, and added, "When we saw Reeder on iPad, we thought: oh, wow, same thinking".

The relative widths of the columns accurately reflects the priority of the media companies that host them: Twitter is mostly about the stream, but also about the content; Gawker is primarily about the content but needs to have the stream.

In this way, blogs are emphasizing the trait that's always defined them, the fact that they're an ongoing flow of information instead of just a collection of published pages. By allowing that flow to continue regardless of which particular piece of embedded content has caught your eye, Gawker and Twitter are just showing the vibrancy and resilience of the format.